Rudolf Steiner Archive & e.Lib Document

Awakening to Community - I

By Rudolf Steiner

GA 257

A lecture delivered at Stuttgart, on February 13th, 1922.
Authorized translation from the German
of Notes unrevised by the lecturer. It is presented here with the
kind permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach,
Switzerland.

This is lecture 4 of 10 from the lecture series:
Anthroposophical Community Building
Published in German as:
Anthroposophische Gemeinschaftbildung.
GA# 257.

The development of
conditions in the Anthroposophical Society makes it seem desirable to
touch on at least a few of them again tonight. It was never really my
intention to use lecture time to go into such matters as
organizational and developmental aspects of the Society, for I see it
as my task to work for pure anthroposophy, and I gladly leave
everything related to the life and development of the Society to
others who have assumed responsibility for it at the various places.
But I hope to be able, at the delegates' meeting that will soon be
held, to discuss at greater length the subject originally intended
for presentation today. In view of the need evidenced by the way the
Society's current concerns are going, you will perhaps allow me to
make a few comments complementing what I said a week ago about the
three phases of anthroposophical development.

Today, I want to bring
out those aspects of the three phases that all three share in common;
last week I concentrated, even though sketchily, on their
differences.

I would like to start
by discussing how a society like ours comes into being. I believe
that what I am about to say could serve many a listener as a means to
self-knowledge and thus prove a good preparation for the delegates'
meeting.

It is certainly clear
to anybody who keeps up with the way civilization and culture are
presently developing that the times themselves demand the deepening
of knowledge, the ethical practice, the inner religious life that
anthroposophy has to offer. On the other hand, however, a society
such as ours has to act as a vanguard in an ever wider disseminating
of those elements that are so needed under the conditions that
prevail today.

How is such a vanguard
created? Everybody who has sought out the Anthroposophical Society
from honest motives will probably recognize a piece of his own
destiny in what I am about to describe.

If we look back over
the twenty-one or twenty-two years of the Society's development, we
will certainly discover that by far the greater number of those who
approach the Society do so out of a sense of dissatisfaction with the
spiritual, psychological and practical conditions they find
surrounding them in life today. In the early days of the Society,
which, when considered factually and not critically, might even be
called its better days, something was taking place that almost
amounted to flight from the life of the present into a different kind
of life built on human community, a community where people could live
in a way they felt in their souls to be in keeping with their dignity
as human beings. This alienation from the spiritual, psychic and
practical situation prevailing in the life around them must be taken
into account as a factor in the founding of the Anthroposophical
Society. For those who became anthroposophists were the first people
to feel what millions and millions of others will be feeling keenly
indeed in a not too distant future, that older forms have come down
into the present from by-gone days in which they were not only fully
justified but the product of historical necessity, but that they no
longer provide what modern man's inner life requires and the dignity
of full humanness demands.

Anyone who has a
really open mind about these things and has come to anthroposophy in
honest seeking will find, if he practices self-observation, that this
drive to satisfy his soul needs in a special community rather than in
just any other present day group of human beings is something that
springs from the innermost core of his humanity, something he feels
to be a special phenomenon of the present moment working its way to
the surface of his soul from the eternal sources of all humanness.
Those who have come honestly to anthroposophy therefore feel the need
to belong to an anthroposophical community to be a real and deep
concern of their hearts, something they cannot really do without if
they are honest. But we must admit, too, that the very clarity
(clarity of feeling, not of thought) with which people seek belonging
in the anthroposophical community shows how little able the outer
world presently is to satisfy a longing for full humanness. People
would not feel so urgently impelled to seek anthroposophy if the
soul's feeling of alienation from conditions existing in the world
today had not become so particularly intense.

But let us go on and
consider something else. What I have been describing thus far might
be called a reversing of human will impulses. A person is born into a
certain period and educated to be a man of his time. The result is
that his will impulses simply coincide with those of all the rest of
the human world around him. He grows up, and as he does so he grows
without any great inner stirrings into the will tendencies of the
surrounding population. It takes a deeply experienced inner revulsion
against these habitual will impulses that he has adopted from the
outside world to turn this erstwhile external will inward. When he
does so, this reversing of the direction of his will causes him to
notice the longing, experienced so keenly in our time, that wells up
as though from eternal wellsprings, impelling him to seek a different
belonging to the community of men than lay in the previous direction
of his will.

Now everything that
has to do with the will is intrinsically ethical and moral. The
impulse that drives a person into the Anthroposophical Society is
thus, in its will and feeling aspects at least, an ethical-moral
impulse. Since this ethical impulse that has brought him into the
Anthroposophical Society stirs him in his innermost holy of holies as
it carries him to the eternal wellsprings of his soul life, it goes
on to develop into a religious impulse. What otherwise lives itself
out simply as a matter of response to externally imposed laws and
traditional mores and as habits more or less thoughtlessly adopted
from the life around one, in other words, everything of an ethical,
moral, religious nature that had developed in the course of one's
growing up, now turns inward and becomes a striving to make one's
ethical-moral and religious being a full inner reality. But it is not
consistent with full human stature for a person to couple his life of
will and — to some extent at least — his life of feeling
with the acceptance of just any haphazard type of knowledge.

The kind of knowledge
that we may not, perhaps, absorb with our mother's milk, but are
certainly receiving as inner soul training by the time we are six,
and go on receiving — all these things that our minds in their
learning capacity take in, confront the ethical, moral and religious
elements in us as their polar opposite, though one perfectly
harmonious and consistent with them. But they are by no means an
inconsiderable item for a person who seeks to bring a religious
deepening into his anthroposophical striving. The kind of life and
practice that civilized man has developed in recent centuries is just
exactly the kind from which an anthroposophist longs to free his
moral, ethical and religious nature. Even if he makes compromises
with the life about him, as indeed he must, his real desire is to
escape from what the civilization of recent centuries has produced,
leading as it has directly to the catastrophic present. It may be
that this desire exists only as an instinct in many of those who seek
out the Anthroposophical Movement, but it is definitely present.

Now let us recognize
the fact that the factors accounting for the development of the
religious and will impulses of recent centuries are the very same
ones responsible for the direction and whole nuance of the modern
life of learning. Only a victim of prejudice could believe and say
that the modern way of knowledge has produced objective physics,
objective mathematics, objective chemistry, that it is working toward
an objective science of biology, and so on. That is pure prejudice.
The real truth is that what we have had drummed into us from about
our sixth year onward is the product of externally influenced will
and religious impulses that have evolved during recent centuries. But
when a person seeking anthroposophy wants to escape from these will
impulses and from the religious forms in which man's moral life finds
its highest expression, he cannot help asking at the same time for a
way of knowledge in keeping not with the world he wants to leave
behind but with the new world of his seeking. Since he has turned his
will impulses inward, he must, in other words, strive for the kind of
knowledge that corresponds to his in-turned will, that takes him ever
further away from the externalized science that has been an outgrowth
of the externalizing of all life in the civilized world in the past
few centuries. An anthroposophist feels that he would have to be
inconsequential and reverse the direction of his will again if he
were not to change the direction of his knowledge. He would have to
be a quite unthinking person to say, “I feel my humanity alien
to the kind of life and practice that past centuries have brought us,
but I feel quite at home with the knowledge they produced.” The
kind of learning that the world he wants to escape from has acquired
can never satisfy a person with an in-turned will. Many an individual
may come to realize purely instinctively that the life and practice
he longs to flee received their present form from the fact that man
believes only in what his eyes see and what his mind makes of his
physical observations. Seekers therefore turn to the invisible
super-sensible realm as the basis of knowledge. Externalized forms of
life and practice are outgrowths of a materialistic science, and a
person impelled to regard these forms as subhuman rather than as
fully human cannot feel suited by a science based on an exclusive
belief in the external and material and what the mind concludes about
them.

After the first act in
the soul drama of the anthroposophist, the moral-religious act, there
comes a second, one already contained in seed form in the first. It
consists in a compulsion to seek super-sensible knowledge. That the
Anthroposophical Society builds its content on knowledge received
from super-sensible worlds is something that comes about quite of
itself. Everything that the will thus experiences as its destiny,
everything that the striving for insight recognizes as its seeking,
is fused into one indivisible whole in the heart and soul of an
anthroposophist; it is the very core of his life and his humanity. As
such it shapes and colors his whole attitude, the state of soul in
which he takes his place in the Society.

But now let us weigh
the consequences this implies for an anthroposophically oriented
person. He cannot just cut himself loose from external life and
practice. He has taken flight into the Anthroposophical Society, but
life's outer needs continue on, and he cannot get away from them in a
single step or with one stroke. So his soul is caught and divided
between his continuing outer life and the ideal life and knowledge
that he has embraced in concept as a member of the Anthroposophical
Society. A cleavage of this sort can be a painful and even tragic
experience, and it becomes such to a degree determined by the depth
or superficiality of the individual. But this very pain, this
tragedy, contains the most precious seeds of the new, constructive
life that has to be built up in the midst of our decaying culture.
For the truth is that everything in life that flowers and bears fruit
is an outgrowth of pain and suffering. It is perhaps just those
individuals with the deepest sense of the Society's mission who have
to have the most personal experience of pain and suffering as they
take on that mission, though it is also true that real human strength
can only be developed by rising above suffering and making it a
living force, the source of one's power to overcome.

The path that leads
into the Society consists firstly, then, in changing the direction of
one's will; secondly, in experiencing super-sensible knowledge;
lastly, in participating in the destiny of one's time to a point
where it becomes one's personal destiny. One feels oneself sharing
mankind's evolution in the act of reversing one's will and
experiencing the super-sensible nature of all truth. Sharing the
experience of the time's true significance is what gives us our first
real feeling for the fact of our humanness. The term
“Anthroposophy” should really be understood as synonymous
with “Sophia,” meaning the content of consciousness, the
soul attitude and experience that make a man a full-fledged human
being. The right interpretation of “Anthroposophy” is not
“the wisdom of man,” but rather “the consciousness
of one's humanity.” In other words, the reversing of the will,
the experiencing of knowledge, and one's participation in the time's
destiny, should all aim at giving the soul a certain direction of
consciousness, a “Sophia.”

What I have been
describing here are the factors that brought the Anthroposophical
Society into being. The Society wasn't really founded; it just came
about. You cannot carry on a pre-conceived campaign to found a thing
that is developing out of some genuine inner reality. An
Anthroposophical Society could come into being only because there
were people predisposed to the reversal of their wills, to the living
knowledge, to the participation in the time's destiny that I have
just characterized, and because something then made its appearance
from some quarter that was able to meet what lived as those needs in
those specific hearts. But such a coming together of human beings
could take place only in our age, the age of the consciousness soul,
and those who do not as yet rightly conceive the nature of the
consciousness soul cannot understand this development. An example was
provided by a university don who made the curious statement that
three people once joined forces and formed the executive committee of
the Anthroposophical Society. This donnish brain (it is better to be
specific about what part of him was involved, since there can be no
question in his case of fully developed humanness), this brain
ferreted out the necessity of asking who selected them and authorized
them to do such a thing. Well, what freer way could there possibly be
for a thing to start than for three people to turn up and announce
that they have such and such a purpose, and anyone who wants to join
them in pursuing it is welcome, and if someone doesn't, why, that's
all right too? Everyone was certainly left perfectly free. Nothing
could have shown more respect for freedom than the way the
Anthroposophical Society came into being. It corresponds exactly to
the developmental level of the consciousness soul period. But one can
perfectly well be a university don without having entered the
consciousness soul age, and in that case will have no understanding
for matters intimately allied to freedom.

I know how
uncomfortable it makes some people when things of this kind have to
be dealt with for the simple reason that they are there confronting
us. They throw light, however, on the question of what must be done
to provide the Society with what it needs to go on living. But since
anthroposophists have to keep on being part of the world around them
and can escape from it on the soul level only, they become prone to
the special nuance of soul experience that I have been describing and
that can run the gamut of inner suffering to the point of actual
tragedy. Soul experience of this kind played a particularly weighty
role in the coming into being of the Anthroposophical Society. Not
only this: it is constantly being re-lived in the case of everyone
who has since sought out the society. The Society naturally has to
reckon with this common element, which is so deeply rooted in its
social life, as with one of the lasting conditions of its
existence.

It is natural, too,
that in an evolution that has gone through three phases, newcomers to
the Movement should find themselves in the first phase with their
feeling life. Many a difficulty stems from the fact that the
Society's leaders have the duty of reconciling the three co-existing
phases with one another. For they go on side by side even though they
developed in succession. Furthermore, in their aspect as past stages
in a sequence, they belong to the past, and are hence memories,
whereas in their simultaneous aspect they are presently still being
lived. A theoretical or doctrinaire approach is therefore out of
place in this situation. What those who want to help foster
anthroposophical life need instead is loving hearts and eyes opened
to the totality of that life. Just as growing old can mean developing
a crochety disposition, becoming inwardly as well as outwardly
wrinkled and bald-headed, losing all feeling for recalling one's
young days vividly enough to make them seem immediate experience, so
too is it possible to enter the Society as late as, say, 1919 and
fail to sense the fresh, new, burgeoning, sprouting life of the
Movement's first phase. This is a capacity one must work to develop.
Otherwise, the right heart and feeling are missing in one's relation
to anthroposophy, with the result that though one may scorn and look
down upon doctrines and theories in other spheres of life, one's
efforts to foster anthroposophical life cannot help becoming
doctrinaire. This does serious damage to a thing as alive as an
Anthroposophical Society ought to be.

Now, a curious kind of
conflict arose during the third phase of the Movement. It began in
1919. I am not going to judge it from an ethical standpoint at the
moment, although thoughtlessness is indeed a will impulse of sorts,
and hence a question of ethics. When something is left undone, due to
thoughtlessness, and that same thoughtlessness leads to a lot of
fiddling around where a firm will is what is really needed, one can
surely see that an ethical-moral element is involved. But I am not as
much interested in going into that aspect of the subject today as I
am in discussing the conflict into which it plunged the Society, a
long-latent conflict. It must be brought out into the open and
frankly discussed.

In the first phases of
anthroposophical development, there was a tendency for the
anthroposophist to split into two people. One part was, say, an
office manager, who did what he had to do in that capacity. He poured
his will into channels formed by the way things have developed in
modern external life and practice during the past few centuries,
channels from which his innermost soul longed to escape. But he was
caught in them, caught with his will.

Now let us be
perfectly clear about the will's intense involvement in all such
pursuits. From one end of the day to the other, the will is involved
in every single thing one does as an office manager or whatever. If
one happens to be a schoolmaster or a professor instead of an office
manager and is therefore more involved in thinking, that thinking
also flows into one's will impulses, insofar as it has bearing on
external life. In other words, one's will really remains connected
with things outside oneself. It is just because the soul wants to
escape from the direction the will is taking that it enters the
Anthroposophical Society with its thought and feeling. So the man of
will ends up in one place, the man of thought and feeling in another.
Of course, this made some people happy indeed, for many a little
sectarian group thought it a most praiseworthy undertaking to meet
and “send out good thoughts” at the end of a day spent
exerting its members' wills in the most ordinary channels. People
formed groups of this sort and sent out good thoughts, escaping from
their outer lives into a life that, while I cannot call it unreal,
consisted exclusively of thoughts and feelings. Each individual split
himself in two, one part going to an office or a classroom, the other
attending an anthroposophical meeting where he led an entirely
different kind of life. But when a number of anthroposophically
thinking and feeling people were moved to apply their wills to the
establishing of anthroposophical enterprises capable of full and
vigorous life, they had to include those wills in the total human
equipment needed for the job. That was the origin of the conflicts
that broke out. It is comparatively easy to train oneself to send out
good thoughts intended to keep a friend on a mountain climb from
breaking his legs. It is much harder to pour good thoughts so
strongly into a will engaged in some external, material activity that
matter itself becomes imbued with spirit as a result of one's having
thus exerted one's humanness. Many an undertaking has suffered
shipwreck because of an inability to do that, during the Society's
third phase of development. There was no shortage of fine
intelligences and geniuses — I say this very sincerely —
but the intelligence and genius available were not sufficiently
applied to stiffening and strengthening the wills involved.

If you look at the
matter from the standpoint of the heart, what a difference you see!
Think how dissatisfied the heart is with one's external life! One
feels dissatisfied not only because other people are so mean and
everything falls so short of perfection, but because life itself
doesn't always make things easy for us. You'll agree that it isn't
invariably a featherbed. Living means work. Here one has this hard
life on the one hand, and on the other the Anthroposophical Society.
One enters the Society laden with all one's dissatisfaction. As a
thinking and feeling person one finds satisfaction there because one
is receiving something that is not available in the outer life one is
justifiably so dissatisfied with. One finds satisfaction in the
Anthroposophical Society. There is even the advantage there that
one's thoughts, which in other situations are so circumscribed by
will's impotence, take wing quite easily when one sits in a circle
sending out good thoughts to keep the legs of friends on mountain
climbs from getting broken. Thoughts fly easily to every part of the
world, and are thus very satisfying. They make up for one's external
life, which is always causing one such justifiable
dissatisfaction.

Now along comes the
Anthroposophical Society and itself starts projects that call for the
inclusion of the will. So now one not only has to be an office
manager in the outer world, though with an Anthroposophical Society
to flee to and to look back from at one's unsatisfactory life outside
— a life one may, on occasion, complain about there; one now
faces both kinds of life within the Society, and is expected to live
them there in a satisfied rather than dissatisfied state of mind!

But this was
inevitable if the Society wanted to go farther and engage in actual
deeds. Beginning in 1919 it did want to do that.

Then something strange
happened, something that could probably happen only in the
Anthroposophical Society, namely, that people no longer knew what to
do with their share of dissatisfaction, which everyone naturally
wants to go on having. For one can hardly accuse the Society of
making one dissatisfied. But that attitude doesn't last. In the long
run people do ascribe their dissatisfaction to it. What they ought to
do instead is to achieve the stage of inner development that
progresses from thoughts and feelings to will, and one does achieve
just that on a rightly travelled anthroposophical path. If you look in
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,
you will see that nowhere
is there a recommendation for developing thought that does not
include aspects that bear on will development.

But modern humanity
suffers from two evils, both of which must be overcome in the
Society. One is fear of the super-sensible. This unadmitted fear
accounts for every enemy the Anthroposophical Movement has. Our
enemies really suffer from something that resembles a fear of water.
You know, of course, that a fear of water can express itself in
another, violently compulsive form, and so we need not be surprised
if the kind I am referring to sometimes vents itself in a sort of
phobia. Sometimes, of course, it can be comparatively harmless. Some
people find anthroposophy a rewarding subject to write about; these
books bring in money and appear on book lists. There must be themes
to write about, and not everybody has one inside him, so it has to be
borrowed from the world outside. The motives in such cases are
sometimes more harmless than one might suppose. But their effects are
not equally harmless.

Fear of super-sensible
knowledge, then, is one characteristic of the human race. But that
fear is made to wear the mask of the scientific approach, and the
scientific approach, with the limits to knowledge it accepts, is in
direct line of inheritance from man's ancient Fall into error. The
only difference is that the ancients conceived the Fall as something
man ought to overcome. The post-scholastic period is still haunted by
a belief in the Fall. But whereas an earlier, moralistic view of it
held that man was born evil and must overcome his nature, the
intellectualistic view holds that man cannot gain access to the
super-sensible with his mind or change his nature. Man's willingness
to accept limits to knowledge is actually an inheritance from the
Fall he suffered. In better days he at least tried to overcome error.
But conceited modern man not only wants to retain his fallen status;
he is actually intent on staying fallen and loving the devil, or at
least trying to love him.

That is the first of
the two evils. The second is the weakness, the inner paralysis that
afflicts modern human wills, despite their seeming activity, which is
often nothing more than pretense. I must add that both these ominous
characteristics of modern civilization and culture are qualities that
anthroposophical life must overcome. If this anthroposophical life is
to develop in a practical direction, everything it undertakes must be
born of fearless knowledge and a really strong will. This presupposes
learning to live with the world in a truly anthroposophical way.
People used to learn to live anthroposophically by fleeing the world.
But they will have to learn to live anthroposophically with the world
and to carry the anthroposophical impulse into everyday life and
practice. That means making one single whole again of the person
hitherto split into an anthroposophist and a practical man. But this
cannot be done so long as a life lived shut away from the world as
though by towering fortress walls that one cannot see over is
mistaken for an anthroposophical life. This sort of thing cannot go
on in the Society. We should keep our eyes wide open to everything
that is happening in the world around us, that will imbue us with the
right will impulses. But as I said the last time, the Society has not
kept pace with anthroposophical life during the third phase of
anthroposophy, and the will element is what has failed to do so. We
have had to call away individuals who formerly guided activities in
the various branches and assign them tasks in connection with this or
that new enterprise, with the frequent result that a person who made
an able Waldorf School teacher became a poor anthroposophist. (This
is not meant as a criticism of any of our institutions. The Waldorf
School is highly regarded by the world at large, not just by circles
close to it, and it can be stated in all modesty that no reason
exists to complain about any of the various institutions, or if there
is, it is on an entirely different score than that of ability.) It is
possible to be both a first-rate Waldorf teacher and a poor
anthroposophist, and the same thing is true of able workers in the
other enterprises. The point is, though, that all the various
enterprises are outgrowths of anthroposophy. This must be kept firmly
in mind. Being a real anthroposophist is the all-important thing.
Waldorf teachers, workers at Der Kommende Tag, scientists, medical
men and other such specialists simply must not turn their backs on
the anthroposophical source or take the attitude that there is no
time left from their work for anthroposophical concerns of a general
nature. Otherwise, though these enterprises may continue to flourish
for a while, due to the fact that anthroposophy itself is full of
life and passes it on to its offspring, that life cannot be
maintained indefinitely, and the offspring movements too would
eventually die for lack of it.

We are dealing with
enemies who will not meet us on objective ground. It is
characteristic of them that they avoid coming to grips with what
anthroposophy itself is, and instead ask questions like, “How
are anthroposophical facts discovered?” or “What is this
clairvoyance?” or “Does so and so drink coffee or
milk?” and other such matters that have no bearing on the
subject, though they are what is most talked about. But enemies
intent on destroying anthroposophy resort to slander, and samples of
it have been turning up of late in phenomena that would have been
quite unthinkable just a short while ago, before civilization reached
its lowest ebb. Now, however, they have become possible. I don't want
to go into the specifics; that can be left to others who presumably
also feel real heart's concern for the fate of anthroposophy. But
since I was able to be with you here today I wanted to bring up these
problems. From the standpoint of the work in Dornach it was not an
opportune moment for me to leave, however happily opportune it was to
be here; there are always two sides to everything. I was needed in
Dornach, but since I could have the deep satisfaction of talking with
you here again today, let me just add this. What is most needed now
is to learn to feel anthroposophically, to feel anthroposophy living
in our very hearts. That can happen only in a state of fullest
clarity, not of mystical becloudedness. Anthroposophy can stand
exposure to the light. Other movements that claim they are similar
cannot endure light; they feel at home in the darkness of
sectarianism. But anthroposophy can stand light in all its fulness;
far from shrinking from exposure to it, anthroposophy enters into the
light with all its heart, with its innermost heart's warmth.
Unfounded personal slander, which sometimes goes so far that the
persons attacked are unrecognizable, can be branded for what it is.
Where enmity is an honest thing, anthroposophy can always reply on an
objective basis. Objective debate, however, requires going into the
question of methods that lead to anthroposophical knowledge. No
objective discussion is possible without satisfying that requirement.
Anybody with a heart and a healthy mind can take in anthroposophy,
but discussions about it have to be based on studying its methods and
getting to understand how its knowledge is derived. Experimentation
and deduction do not call for inner development; they merely require
a training that can be given anybody. A person with no further
background is in no position to carry on a debate about anthroposophy
without undergoing training in its methods.

But the easy-going
people of our time are not about to let themselves in for any such
training. They cling to the dogma that man has reached perfection,
and they don't want to hear a word about developing. But neither
goodness nor truth are accessible to man unless he acts in the very
core of his free being to open up the way to them. Those who realize
what impulses are essential to sharing with one's heart in the life
and guidance of the Anthroposophical Society and who know how to
assess its enemies' motives will, if they have sufficient goodwill,
also find the strength needed to bring through to a wholesome
conclusion these concerns with which, it was stated before I began
this talk, the Society itself is also eager to deal.